On the Moral Architecture of Spray Cheese

The restaurant was the kind of place that puts a single microgreen on a white plate and charges you forty dollars for the experience of wondering where the food is. Gay had chosen it. Sedaris was eating bread from a basket that had appeared without anyone ordering it, tearing pieces off with the focused aggression of someone who suspects the entrée will be a concept rather than a meal.

“I hate this place,” he said, chewing. “The bread is good, though.”

“The bread is always good at places like this,” Gay said. “That’s how they get you. The bread is the apology for what’s coming.”

I’d invited them both to talk about guilty pleasures. Not the phrase — the phrase is dead, or should be — but the thing underneath it. The experience of consuming something you enjoy completely and cannot defend to anyone whose opinion you respect. I said this, and Sedaris looked at me as though I’d proposed we discuss our bowel movements, which, given his bibliography, was not as far-fetched as it should have been.

“Define ‘cannot defend,’” he said.

“I mean the things where, if someone you admired asked you what you were watching or eating or reading, you’d minimize the browser tab of your life.”

“Everything I do is indefensible,” Sedaris said. “That’s the starting position. You begin with the assumption that you’re an embarrassment, and then the essay is about discovering the specific topology of the embarrassment.” He paused. “I don’t know what topology means. I just like the word.”

Gay was shaking her head. “No. That’s different. What you do is take the embarrassing thing and turn it into comedy — the exposure is the performance. What I’m talking about is the stuff you don’t put in the essay. The things you enjoy that you can’t even ironize. You can’t make them funny because making them funny would be another way of not admitting you just like them.”

“Give me an example,” Sedaris said.

“I watch competition baking shows,” Gay said, “and I don’t watch them critically. I don’t watch them as a cultural critic examining the semiotics of fondant. I watch them because a woman in Lancashire is trying to make a three-tiered lemon drizzle cake and I am genuinely worried she will not succeed, and when she does succeed I feel a relief that is out of all proportion to what has happened. Nothing has happened. A cake exists. And I am moved.”

Sedaris considered this. “That’s not a guilty pleasure. That’s just a pleasure.”

“It’s guilty because I know it’s engineered to make me feel exactly that way. The editors chose the music, the close-ups of the wobbling sponge, the contestant’s nervous hands. I know the manipulation is happening and I consent to it anyway. I open my mouth and let them spoon it in.”

I wrote that down — open my mouth and let them spoon it in — because it felt like it belonged somewhere, though I wasn’t sure where yet.

“My sister Lisa,” Sedaris said, and then didn’t say anything for ten seconds, which for him is an eternity. “Lisa eats spray cheese. From the can. Not on crackers. She tilts her head back and puts the nozzle in her mouth and presses the button. She does this in the kitchen, standing up, at two in the morning. I walked in on her doing it once and the look on her face — it was the look of someone who has been caught at something that isn’t a crime but should be. It’s not illegal to eat spray cheese from the can at two in the morning, but it feels like it violates some ordinance that hasn’t been written yet.”

“Did you put that in an essay?” Gay asked.

“I’m giving it to this one.” He gestured at me. “Consider it a gift. I’ve been holding onto it for eleven years because I couldn’t find the right container.”

“The right container for spray cheese,” Gay said. “I want that sentence on my headstone.”

I asked them what the essay we were building should actually be about. Not guilty pleasures as a category — something more specific.

“The gap,” Gay said immediately. “The essay should live inside the gap between what you believe and what you enjoy. Because the gap is where the comedy is. I believe that food culture in America is a predatory system designed to exploit neurological vulnerabilities for profit. I also ate a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in a hotel room last Thursday and licked the dust off my fingers and felt something close to religious gratitude. Both of those things are true at the same time. The essay lives in the ‘at the same time.’”

“The gap is funny,” Sedaris agreed, “but the gap is also where people live. Not as a temporary condition. As an address. I think most people have accepted that they will never close the gap between what they think they should enjoy and what they actually enjoy, and the acceptance is — I don’t want to say beautiful—”

“Then don’t,” Gay said. “The word is closer to ‘exhausting.’ People are exhausted by the project of pretending their pleasures are coherent.”

I tried to steer the conversation toward structure. I said the essay might work as a list — a catalog of specific guilty pleasures, each one examined and confessed.

Sedaris made a face that I have never seen on another human being. It was the face of someone who has just discovered that a person they are dining with eats salad with their hands.

“Not a list,” he said. “A list is a format for people who can’t sustain a thought for more than a paragraph. A list essay says: I have nine things to tell you and no idea how they connect. The connections are the essay. The places where one confession leaks into the next — that’s the writing.”

“He’s right,” Gay said, and she said it the way you concede a chess move — acknowledging the quality of the play while being annoyed about it. “Though I’d push back on ‘sustain a thought.’ Some of the best personal essays in the last twenty years have been built on fragmentation. The numbered section. The braided form.”

“Fragmentation as a structure is different from fragmentation as an excuse for not having a structure,” Sedaris said.

“Agreed. But a catalog can be a structure if each entry deepens instead of just adding.”

They looked at each other. Something was being negotiated that I couldn’t quite see.

“So not a list,” I said. “But there should be specific items. Specific confessions.”

“The specificity is everything,” Sedaris said. “Nobody cares that you have guilty pleasures. Everyone has guilty pleasures. What makes it an essay is when you tell me that you eat spray cheese at two in the morning standing in the kitchen with the refrigerator light as your only illumination, and that the sound the can makes — that particular pressurized hiss — is a sound you have come to associate with a kind of freedom that you cannot explain to your therapist because explaining it would require you to first explain why you’re eating spray cheese at two in the morning, which would require you to explain the thing underneath that, which is that you have been performing competence and taste for so long that the only time you can be the person you actually are is when everyone else is asleep.”

The table was quiet. The waiter appeared and disappeared, reading the room with the instinct of someone trained in the hospitality of silence.

“That’s the essay,” Gay said softly. “What you just said. The performance of taste. That’s what we’re really talking about. Not guilty pleasures — guilty taste. The idea that your preferences say something about who you are, and that the wrong preferences disqualify you from the kind of personhood you’ve been constructing for decades.”

I asked whether the narrator should be ashamed or defiant.

“Both,” they said, simultaneously, and then looked startled, because simultaneous agreement between them felt like a weather event — rare and meteorologically improbable.

“The narrator should be the person who knows that spray cheese is a processed food product with no nutritional value and a shelf life that suggests it may not technically be food,” Sedaris said. “And who also knows that the feeling of eating it — the specific oral experience of aerated cheese product hitting your palate — is a feeling they would not trade for a Michelin-starred tasting menu. And the essay is about holding both of those things at once without irony, because irony would be another way of not admitting it.”

“Without irony is hard for you,” Gay observed.

“Without irony is hard for everyone. That’s why we need irony. It’s a prophylactic.”

I made the mistake of laughing, and Sedaris looked at me with genuine irritation. “I’m not being funny. I mean it. Irony is how people protect themselves from the vulnerability of admitting they like what they like. And this essay — if it’s going to be worth reading — has to take the irony out for at least a few sentences. It has to be the person standing in the kitchen with the spray cheese saying: this is what I am.”

“And then it can be funny again?” I asked.

“It should never stop being funny. The funny and the sincere have to coexist in every paragraph. The moment you separate them — the moment you have the comedy section and the feelings section — you’ve lost.”

Gay was tearing a piece of bread now, working it slowly, thinking. “I want to talk about the body,” she said. “Because guilty pleasures are almost always about the body. The things we put into it, the things we do with it, the way we decorate it, the way we present it. The guilt is always somatic. You don’t feel guilty about enjoying a poem. You feel guilty about enjoying a cheeseburger, or a reality show, or a pop song — things that enter through the senses rather than the intellect. The hierarchy of pleasures is a hierarchy of the body versus the mind, and the mind always wins, officially, and the body always wins, actually.”

“The body always wins actually,” I repeated, because it felt like a sentence that deserved to be heard twice.

“Don’t quote me to me,” Gay said.

Sedaris was looking at the bread basket, which was empty. He looked mournful. “The bread was the best thing here,” he said. “That’s a guilty pleasure. Sitting in a restaurant where the cheapest entrée costs forty-two dollars and the thing you liked most was the free bread. That’s the essay. The free bread was better than the entrée, and admitting it makes you feel like a fraud, because you’re supposed to be the kind of person who appreciates truffle foam.”

“Have you ever appreciated truffle foam?” Gay asked.

“Once. In Paris. But I think what I appreciated was Paris.”

I brought up the idea of a narrator who conducts an inventory — not a list, but a reckoning. Someone who goes through their day and notes every moment of consumption where their pleasure diverges from their stated values. The morning coffee from a chain they publicly denounce. The podcast that is objectively terrible but that they listen to every week with the devotion of a parishioner. The television show they’ve watched four times through without telling anyone.

“That’s good,” Gay said, “but it can’t just be funny. Or it can — it should be — but underneath the funny has to be the question of why we’ve built a culture where enjoying things requires a defense. Why do we need the word ‘guilty’ in front of ‘pleasure’? When did pleasure become something you had to justify?”

“1620,” Sedaris said. “The Puritans.”

“He’s not wrong.”

“I’m rarely wrong about the Puritans.”

I asked about the ending. I’d been thinking about an ending that circles back — a bookend.

“No bookends,” Gay said sharply. “Bookends are for essays that want to feel finished. This shouldn’t feel finished. This should feel like the narrator is still in the middle of their inventory, still cataloging the gap between who they are and who they pretend to be, and the essay just — stops. Mid-catalog. Because the catalog doesn’t end. You don’t stop having guilty pleasures. You don’t close the gap. You just stop talking about it for a while.”

“I agree about no bookends,” Sedaris said, “but I want a specific image at the end. Not a metaphor. A thing. The narrator should be eating something, or watching something, or doing something that is itself a guilty pleasure, and the essay should end mid-consumption. Not mid-sentence — that’s gimmicky. But mid-act. The narrator with the spray cheese in their hand, or the remote pointed at the television, or the earbuds in, and the essay ends and the pleasure continues past the edge of the page.”

“The pleasure continues past the edge of the page,” Gay repeated.

There was a long silence. Not uncomfortable. The kind of silence that happens when people have been talking for a long time and arrive at a place where the next sentence will either be the best one yet or a disappointment, and nobody wants to risk the disappointment.

The waiter came by with dessert menus. Gay took one. Sedaris didn’t. I asked for the check.

“One more thing,” Gay said, not looking up from the menu. “The narrator has to own it. Whatever their guilty pleasures are — and they should be specific and real and slightly humiliating — the narrator cannot distance themselves from them. No ‘I know this is ridiculous.’ No winking at the reader. The reader should feel like they’ve been let into a room the narrator didn’t mean to leave unlocked.”

“And the room is full of spray cheese,” Sedaris said.

“The room is full of whatever it’s full of. But yes.”

Gay ordered the crème brûlée, which cost twenty-eight dollars and came in a portion designed for a mouse with refined taste. She ate it in two bites and looked satisfied in a way that had nothing to do with being full.

“That was four dollars a bite,” Sedaris said.

“Fourteen,” Gay corrected. “And worth every cent. That’s the essay too, by the way. Paying fourteen dollars for a single bite of something and not being sorry about it. Not performing regret. Not saying ‘I shouldn’t have.’ Just: I wanted it. I ate it. It was